There are a lot of talented, professional people working for free: Linux programmers, Debian developers, Gnome developers....
Pros working off-hours or subsidized by their employers.
The no-show job that provides a weekly paycheck to the writer or scientist has always been an easier sell than openly spending money on the arts or basic research.
Are you saying there is less free talent available in the AV arts than in programming?
The programmer may forget how much he depends on the talent, material resources and logistical support provided by his employers.
You say you want to produce a pulse-pounding live-action space opera for the 21st Century?
There are substantial costs up-front.
You need to design, build and house your standing sets.
Expect to become intimately acquainted with zoning boards, fire codes, landlord-tenant relations.
You will need art designers, interior decorators, carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians.
some users will cost you far more than other users. Further, if you kicked all those users off your service tomorrow, you wouldn't lose that much money
You might be making more money - with less investment in infrastructure.
if you charged people the actual cost of unlimited service and then spent it on providing it, which includes actually building out new capacity, then you wouldn't be able to give your execs gigantic bonuses they don't deserve.
This assumes there are enough customers willing to bear the real cost of providing "unlimited service" to make the investment worthwhile.
I know that this doesn't really matter to Mozilla per se, but Firefox is coming under some tough times in the near future.
It certainly does matter to Moz if Google pulls the plug:
"In 2006 the Mozilla Foundation received $66.8 million in revenues, of which $61.5 million is attributed to "search royalties." Mozilla Foundation
That is as close to 90% as makes no difference.
It strikes me as worrisome that this is the best and most recent look at the foundation's finances that the Wikipedia has to offer.
H.264
H.264 is an interesting and instructive example of how technology which evolved outside the browser - outside the Internet - can infiltrate the web and take hold with a vengeance.
I don't recall anyone here predicting the pocket HD camcorder at $125.
It says something about the limits of the "standards compliant" browser and the standards committee - with its snail-slow decision making, commercial, nationalist and ideological rivalries.
I thought this Slashdot story...led us to believe otherwise - at least if the stream you encode ends up being used commercially; and some interest groups tend to believe that having an ad on your site where the video is played back = commercial exploitation
MPEG LA has no interest in you until you are raking in the big green.
There are no royalties on videos twelve minutes or less.
The TV broadcaster's license for H.264 video is a) a flat one-time charge of $2500 per AVC encoder or b) scaled to the size of his market - starting at 100,000 households.
This is the proposed model for Internet distribution.
The key words here are "renumeration from other sources."
If videos are drawing advertisers to your site and adds are generating significant revenue for your site - revenues on the scale of your home town Eyewitness News station, then, yes, you probably will have to cough up some dough.
The H.264 "enterprise cap" for Apple, Disney, Microsoft, Google, et. al, would currently be $5 million a year.
For all their video distribution channels.
Self-hosting freely distributed feature length video is lunatic without deep-pocket sponsorship - which is what MPEG LA is really looking for.
your agerage 15 year old today has more publishing power worldwide than bertelsmann, time warner, etc., had in 1990. this really means something, and what it means is: copyright law (as applied to end consumers), is dead, and unenforceable
The fifteen year old is an unlicensed distributor, not a publisher.
He doesn't put anything new on the market - and he has no interest in reprinting anything old. No interest in serving an audience older or younger than himself.
The product he offers is second-rate.
The amateur's DVD rip. Distributed through networks which are slow and fragile.
Netflix can keep 100,000 videos in its catalog, 20,000 on-line, and contract to have its service built in to every Internet enabled video device priced over $100.
All these things limit the fifteen year old's power dramatically.
This isn't a "law" this is an agreement, meaning it basically passes without the consent of the people. Essentially the US is letting other countries write the laws for us. This is exactly what the founding fathers warned us about with "Free Trade With All, Entangling Alliances With None".
From Article 6 of the US Constitution:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
The language couldn't made much plainer - and it shows damn little fear of alliances or any involuntary loss of sovereignty.
I have never in my life uploaded a song to 150,000 people.
CNET logged 206 million downloads of LimeWire before it stopped hosting the app.
240,000 a week.
Your upload can be replicated endlessly -
and theoretically traced back as the ultimate source for millions of downloads.
When theory becomes practice, the statutory limit on damages protects you.
The vanity of the uploader - who signed or captioned his videos - made this easy to see on LimeWire. You'd be offered 45 links to begin a download, all unmistakably the same rip.
But LimeWire was Download.com's most successful P2P app - with 206,669,520 downloads. 241,000 downloads a week in March. LimeWire 5.5.7
The mp3 track retails for about $1.
The feature length video $15-$30. The video rental $1 to $5.
LimeWire profited from the unlicensed distribution of legally protected content on an unprecedented scale.
Disney can produce a "High School Musical" for $10 million dollars, then franchise the product for amateur production, ice shows, theme parks and so on.
The tween audience - mostly female - is on the fringes of the P2P demographic, and the return from video sales and rentals should be largely untouched.
But strip away $200 million in revenues and productions like Star Trek or The Dark Knight with $200 million dollar budgets become much harder to justify and finance.
The geek's file-sharing habits can have a real, negative, impact on production of the films he most wants to see.
What she got was yet another box for me to put in the chain between her television and the antenna attached to the pole shed.
Nowhere, Nebraska implies legacy - low power - VHF broadcast and UHF transponders.
Trash the old - likely decades old - antenna.
Mount a new one, designed for fringe area reception. Mount it high. Don't cut any corners. Work strictly by-the-book. If you aren't comfortable with heights, let a pro do the job.
You can get the 48 light deal and setup a grid of lights to provide night time lighting for six hours and you won't have to pay the electricity bill.
Nokero claims "over" two hours of light on a typical daily charge - which is about right if you want a direct replacement for a bottled gas or kerosene lantern.
This story reminded me that there is still a market for the kerosene fueled refrigerator.
where an end user pays directly for video services on a title-by-title basis...royalties for video greater than 12 minutes (there is no royalty for a title 12 minutes or less) are..the lower of 2% of the price paid to the Licensee (on first arms length sale of the video) or $0.02 per title
Subscription services:
Where an end user pays directly for video services on a subscription-basis (not ordered or limited title-by-title), the applicable royalties...payable by the service or content provider are...100,000 or fewer subscribers during the year = no royalty; greater than 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers during the year = $25,000; greater than 250,000 to 500,000 subscribers during the year = $50,000; greater than 500,000 to 1,000,000 subscribers during the year = $75,000; greater than 1,000,000 subscribers during the year =$100,000.
Sponsorship
Where remuneration is from other sources, in the case of free television [over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission]...which is not paid for by an End User), the licensee [the broadcaster] may pay...according to one of two royalty options: (i) a one-time payment of $2,500 per AVC transmission encoder...or (ii) annual fee per Broadcast Market starting at $2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households
In the case of Internet broadcast (AVC video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an end user for which the end user does not pay..for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither title-by-title nor subscription), there will be no royalty during the first term of the License (ending December 31, 2010) and following term (ending December 31, 2015), after which the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.
The enterprise cap
In the case of the...sublicenses for video content or service providers, the maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an enterprise (commonly controlled legal entities) is...$5 million per year in 2010.
Renewable five-year license
License will be renewable for five-year periods...on reasonable terms and conditions which may take into account prevailing market conditions, changes in technological environment and available commercial products at the time, but for the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specific licensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal
To sum up:
If you are worth less than $2500 to MPEG LA they don't want to hear from you.
[Retail sale of 125,000 Trek Wars disks @ 2 cents a disk]
Under the existing formula, the licensing cost to Apple, Disney, Microsoft or Google for hosting freely distributed H.264 video on the Internet would be capped at $5 million a year.
Slashdot Mirror
NEWSFLASH - not everyone in developing nation is starving and short of food.
That's true.
But in a hot climate how long will it be before the boiled potato rots?
There are a lot of talented, professional people working for free: Linux programmers, Debian developers, Gnome developers....
Pros working off-hours or subsidized by their employers.
The no-show job that provides a weekly paycheck to the writer or scientist has always been an easier sell than openly spending money on the arts or basic research.
Are you saying there is less free talent available in the AV arts than in programming?
The programmer may forget how much he depends on the talent, material resources and logistical support provided by his employers.
You say you want to produce a pulse-pounding live-action space opera for the 21st Century?
There are substantial costs up-front.
You need to design, build and house your standing sets.
Expect to become intimately acquainted with zoning boards, fire codes, landlord-tenant relations.
You will need art designers, interior decorators, carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians.
Costume designers and seamstresses.
Prop-makers....
The GUI is just the tip of the iceberg. It's the least important as far as overall functionality, but it's what everyone sees and reacts to
Of course it is. The UI is how users communicate with your program. It is core functionality to them.
You build a car for the driver, not the mechanic.
Despite Thomas Jefferson's fantasies, most Americans seem to prefer parties.
They also seem to prefer winner take all. They don't like ties. They don't like run-offs. They don't like multiple-choice.
They don't like fragile coalitions where the minority parties at the ideological extreme holds the majority hostage.
There is only seat to fill in your Congressional district.
It will be ten to twelve years before the winner breaks out the pack, takes on a leadership role in the Congress.
Preferences may get your candidate into office - the question is, will he hold the office long enough to be productive?
If you're broadcast your data via radio, why on earth would you expect anyone to consider it private?
The expectation of privacy can be legally defined.
In the US, The Radio Act of 1927 made a clear distinction between public broadcast and private networks and services.
Things like marine radio. Police and fire services.
Subscription radio.
The decision was made that these evolving technologies and services were too valuable to the community to be casually subverted by an eavesdropper.
There would be rules against disclosure, against commercial exploitation.
some users will cost you far more than other users. Further, if you kicked all those users off your service tomorrow, you wouldn't lose that much money
You might be making more money - with less investment in infrastructure.
if you charged people the actual cost of unlimited service and then spent it on providing it, which includes actually building out new capacity, then you wouldn't be able to give your execs gigantic bonuses they don't deserve.
This assumes there are enough customers willing to bear the real cost of providing "unlimited service" to make the investment worthwhile.
Why they have the right to be stupid let's be honest.
But do they have the right to be stupid?
No one thinks it unusual when roads are closed to all non-essential travel because of weather conditions or other hazards.
That's odd you feel that way, considering the amateurs outnumber the pros 1000 to 1.
The amateur lacks organization, discipline, training and resources. It's the pro who goes into the field with a thousand men at his back.
Suppose something happened to Lamo in revenge, out there in the offline world - maybe such operations would be discouraged in future.
That is a game any number can play. But the pros are likely to win.
I know that this doesn't really matter to Mozilla per se, but Firefox is coming under some tough times in the near future.
It certainly does matter to Moz if Google pulls the plug:
"In 2006 the Mozilla Foundation received $66.8 million in revenues, of which $61.5 million is attributed to "search royalties." Mozilla Foundation
That is as close to 90% as makes no difference.
It strikes me as worrisome that this is the best and most recent look at the foundation's finances that the Wikipedia has to offer.
H.264
H.264 is an interesting and instructive example of how technology which evolved outside the browser - outside the Internet - can infiltrate the web and take hold with a vengeance.
I don't recall anyone here predicting the pocket HD camcorder at $125.
It says something about the limits of the "standards compliant" browser and the standards committee - with its snail-slow decision making, commercial, nationalist and ideological rivalries.
I thought this Slashdot story...led us to believe otherwise - at least if the stream you encode ends up being used commercially; and some interest groups tend to believe that having an ad on your site where the video is played back = commercial exploitation
MPEG LA has no interest in you until you are raking in the big green.
There are no royalties on videos twelve minutes or less.
The TV broadcaster's license for H.264 video is a) a flat one-time charge of $2500 per AVC encoder or b) scaled to the size of his market - starting at 100,000 households.
This is the proposed model for Internet distribution.
The key words here are "renumeration from other sources."
If videos are drawing advertisers to your site and adds are generating significant revenue for your site - revenues on the scale of your home town Eyewitness News station, then, yes, you probably will have to cough up some dough.
The H.264 "enterprise cap" for Apple, Disney, Microsoft, Google, et. al, would currently be $5 million a year.
For all their video distribution channels.
Self-hosting freely distributed feature length video is lunatic without deep-pocket sponsorship - which is what MPEG LA is really looking for.
your agerage 15 year old today has more publishing power worldwide than bertelsmann, time warner, etc., had in 1990. this really means something, and what it means is: copyright law (as applied to end consumers), is dead, and unenforceable
The fifteen year old is an unlicensed distributor, not a publisher.
He doesn't put anything new on the market - and he has no interest in reprinting anything old. No interest in serving an audience older or younger than himself.
The product he offers is second-rate.
The amateur's DVD rip. Distributed through networks which are slow and fragile.
Netflix can keep 100,000 videos in its catalog, 20,000 on-line, and contract to have its service built in to every Internet enabled video device priced over $100.
All these things limit the fifteen year old's power dramatically.
That's just the first step! Once they get enough signatures, they'll print signs and hold protests on campuses all over Boston!
They'll need a new mascot. Everyone loves a mascot. Windows 7 Sins
This isn't a "law" this is an agreement, meaning it basically passes without the consent of the people. Essentially the US is letting other countries write the laws for us. This is exactly what the founding fathers warned us about with "Free Trade With All, Entangling Alliances With None".
From Article 6 of the US Constitution:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
The language couldn't made much plainer - and it shows damn little fear of alliances or any involuntary loss of sovereignty.
I have never in my life uploaded a song to 150,000 people.
CNET logged 206 million downloads of LimeWire before it stopped hosting the app.
240,000 a week.
Your upload can be replicated endlessly -
and theoretically traced back as the ultimate source for millions of downloads.
When theory becomes practice, the statutory limit on damages protects you.
The vanity of the uploader - who signed or captioned his videos - made this easy to see on LimeWire. You'd be offered 45 links to begin a download, all unmistakably the same rip.
Sorry, but NO song is worth that much.
CNET no longer hosts the program.
But LimeWire was Download.com's most successful P2P app - with 206,669,520 downloads.
241,000 downloads a week in March. LimeWire 5.5.7
The mp3 track retails for about $1.
The feature length video $15-$30. The video rental $1 to $5.
LimeWire profited from the unlicensed distribution of legally protected content on an unprecedented scale.
Disney can produce a "High School Musical" for $10 million dollars, then franchise the product for amateur production, ice shows, theme parks and so on.
The tween audience - mostly female - is on the fringes of the P2P demographic, and the return from video sales and rentals should be largely untouched.
But strip away $200 million in revenues and productions like Star Trek or The Dark Knight with $200 million dollar budgets become much harder to justify and finance.
The geek's file-sharing habits can have a real, negative, impact on production of the films he most wants to see.
Easy to say.
But Win XP has a global market share of 63%. Something like 500 million users - at all skill levels.
What happens to them when you disable part of the help system?
there's nothing to stop you buying an external BD player. Newegg has 'em under $150.
The external player at $150+ will deliver 1080p video with full theater sound. It will also stream Netflix and as many as 25 other services.
A self-hosted file, if it becomes popular, even if it's free, will cost you .02 per download.
That is 2 cents to be paid on every H.264 video SALE.
Titles with a run time of over 12 minutes.
Did you miss the part about "other sources of renumeration?"
I take that as meaning you have a sponsor.
Someone willing to underwrite the cost of distributing your free feature length videos.
But self-hosting video is lunatic.
We STILL don't have TV service. If it isn't available on Netflix or Hulu, we don't watch it.
You won't find local news, weather and sports on Hulu.
HD off-air can be damn good - and there are no bandwidth caps or subscription fees. The well-rated USB tuner for your laptop will cost maybe $60.
What she got was yet another box for me to put in the chain between her television and the antenna attached to the pole shed.
Nowhere, Nebraska implies legacy - low power - VHF broadcast and UHF transponders.
Trash the old - likely decades old - antenna.
Mount a new one, designed for fringe area reception. Mount it high. Don't cut any corners. Work strictly by-the-book. If you aren't comfortable with heights, let a pro do the job.
Consider installing a very low-noise pre-amp.
seriously, how many gamers have Wii's gathering dust in their closets already?
As of 10 AM ET this morning, the Will holds 11 of the top 25 slots - hardware and software - as best sellers in video games for Amazon.com.
a knockoff copy of their controller
Natal was always much more than a knock-off.
You can get the 48 light deal and setup a grid of lights to provide night time lighting for six hours and you won't have to pay the electricity bill.
Nokero claims "over" two hours of light on a typical daily charge - which is about right if you want a direct replacement for a bottled gas or kerosene lantern.
This story reminded me that there is still a market for the kerosene fueled refrigerator.
But this lamp seems least useful where it would be most needed - where days are short, nights are long, and the weather uncooperative.
SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
Retail sale - disk or download:
where an end user pays directly for video services on a title-by-title basis...royalties for video greater than 12 minutes (there is no royalty for a title 12 minutes or less) are..the lower of 2% of the price paid to the
Licensee (on first arms length sale of the video) or $0.02 per title
Subscription services:
Where an end user pays directly for video services on a subscription-basis (not ordered or limited title-by-title), the applicable royalties...payable by the service or content provider are...100,000 or fewer subscribers during the year = no royalty; greater than 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers during the year = $25,000; greater than 250,000 to 500,000 subscribers during the year = $50,000; greater than 500,000 to 1,000,000 subscribers during the year = $75,000; greater than 1,000,000 subscribers during the year =$100,000.
Sponsorship
Where remuneration is from other sources, in the case of free television [over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission]...which is not paid for by an End User), the licensee [the broadcaster] may pay...according to one of two royalty options: (i) a one-time payment of $2,500 per AVC transmission encoder...or (ii) annual fee per Broadcast Market starting at $2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households
In the case of Internet broadcast (AVC video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an end user for which the end user does not pay..for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither title-by-title nor subscription), there will be no royalty during the first term of the License (ending December 31, 2010) and following term (ending December 31, 2015), after which the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.
The enterprise cap
In the case of the...sublicenses for video content or service providers, the maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an enterprise (commonly controlled legal entities) is...$5 million per year in 2010.
Renewable five-year license
License will be renewable for five-year periods...on reasonable terms and conditions which may take into account prevailing market conditions, changes in technological environment and available commercial products at the time, but for the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specific
licensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal
To sum up:
If you are worth less than $2500 to MPEG LA they don't want to hear from you.
[Retail sale of 125,000 Trek Wars disks @ 2 cents a disk]
Under the existing formula, the licensing cost to Apple, Disney, Microsoft or Google for hosting freely distributed H.264 video on the Internet would be capped at $5 million a year.
Chicken feed.